A Breath of Fresh Air
Sweeps Into Hell,
But There’s Still No Way Outby John Chuckman
www.dissidentvoice.org
May 21, 2005

Like
a refreshing breeze blowing briefly over those damned to endure the hell
created by America's government came the words of British M.P. George
Galloway to an American Senate Committee. The man was simply magnificent.
Tough, brave, and articulate -- hurling unanswerable truth at blubbering
political lowlifes in silk suits.

Washington is the
most dishonest place on earth, and with that fact goes another, that the
American people are among the earth's worst governed. These creepy
American Gauleiters had wronged Galloway with faked accusations of his
profiting from oil trading with Saddam Hussein. My God, it's just one
filthy lie after another. They tried smearing Kofi Annan with the same
kind of stuff.

Why is it so rarely
Americans who take on their own lying, murderous political establishment?
It has always been the same. How few Americans stood up to that bellowing
angry drunk, political wife-beater, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or that ugly
maggot sucking at the nation's liberties, J. Edgar Hoover.

George Galloway's
real crime is to have been a sharp thorn in Tony Blair's side, a powerful
critic of the stupid Iraq War. Blair dreamt he would rise to Churchillian
heights by attending training classes in Crawford, Texas, on how to rig an
illegal war. Today he looks more like the sad, depleted Lloyd George
expressing his admiration for that rising new star in Europe, Hitler.

American liberals
keep writing about their press's failure to do its job. Many of the people
writing these things are children of the Woodward and Bernstein years
under Nixon, a time when there was the brief illusion of an honest press,
the tribune of the public, the fourth estate or unofficial branch of
government, and other hero-comic phrases.

But that was a brief
time of special circumstances. Nixon by then was disliked by a good deal
of the American establishment. The War in Vietnam, blackening America's
reputation worldwide, serving no worthwhile purpose, and clearly being
lost, threatened to divide the nation as ferociously as had the Civil War.

The more usual
situation now prevails. We are back to the same press that never
questioned a Gulf of Tonkin Incident, something as phony as Nazi Germany's
shooting a batch prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms and claiming Poland
had attacked the Reich.

There can be no more
acid comment on the American press's role in Bush's sleazy war than the
mere observation of the New York Times' regular use of the
out-of-date, sentimental term GI when referring to America's professional
killers now occupying Iraq.

It is not clear yet
that America's establishment dislikes Bush. The profits from money thrown
around Washington likes slops at an industrial-scale hog farm are
delightful while the broader cost of Bush's brutish stupidity has not yet
registered. Events on this scale take time to play out. The invasion of
Iraq, just as the War in Vietnam, will prove certainly to have been an
unmitigated disaster, mass killing and destruction to no good purpose, but
the full cost won't be known for years.

America's own deaths
in Iraq are still small in number so far as wars go. Why is that, apart
from the nature of the invasion itself which resembled the entire
Wehrmacht bravely rolling over tiny Greece? Only days ago, a news item in
Europe informed us that British military commanders are shocked by
American tactics during the occupation, and they have tried advising them,
to no effect yet, on altering their ways.

Essentially,
Americans sit in Kevlar armor with weapons of horrific fire power behind
barriers and in no-go zones. They have absolutely no relationship with the
people. They make no friends, only future enemies, as they shoot anyone --
almost exclusively innocent civilians -- who doesn't understand the rules.
Once in a while, they launch a massive assault against a target assumed to
be a center of armed opposition. Fallujah was one of these, and its utter
ruin represents today almost the same kind of ferocious symbol that the
Nazi-obliterated village of Lidice did for World War II.

Anyone can see, even
reading the manipulated American press, that these tactics are failing.
The attacks of Iraqi resistance forces just keep increasing. The
rebuilding of the country, without which there is no hope for long-term
stability, isn't proceeding as it should. The country's pathetic excuse
for an elected government doesn't yet function as a government. New
revelations of American abuses steadily feed indignation and resentments
around the world.

Americans are not
people with long-term vision. "I want it all, and I want it now," would be
the appropriate current national motto. This quality makes Americans among
the least qualified people on earth to undertake some of the tasks their
politicians set them. The patience of the Chinese or the stiff upper lip
of the Brits is missing in people trained to get pissed-off about late
pizzas. That's part of the reason for the brutal, senseless nature of the
occupation, and that's why the Internet press is full of liberal and other
anti-war demands that American troops leave Iraq.

I wish that were
possible, but it would be totally irresponsible. The destruction is done,
the horrible mess is made. Americans have a clear responsibility to
prevent Iraq's falling into total bloody chaos. American troops will
remain in Iraq, and will keep dying there, for years. As from all horrible
situations, some good may eventually come. Maybe, just maybe, it will dawn
on Americans how destructive and ignorant their politicians' approach to
world affairs truly is.

But I doubt it. The
essence of hell is that there is no escape.

John Chuckman
lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil
company. Copyright (C) 2005 by John Chuckman.